


Where Words Fail

by ishtarelisheba



Series: Better to Face the Bullets 'verse [7]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen, Ish promptathon, violin playing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-04 05:14:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10269059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishtarelisheba/pseuds/ishtarelisheba
Summary: How Rummond acquired his violin and learned to play. A one-shot in the Better to Face the Bullets 'verse.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt - _white-throated-packrat said: BTFTB prompt -- Navy officer Gold and his fiddle lessons? Does he get a crewman to teach him? Does he take lessons sometime when he's got a shore assignment?_

He’d been in the Navy for not quite a year when Christmas rolled around and his ship made port in Gibraltar. Not many were terribly thrilled to be missing the holidays with their families, but a handful of the younger sailors aboard had taken it upon themselves to organize an outing in the city. It was meant to take the sharp edges off of missing loved ones. Rummond only felt lonelier.

He split off from the rapidly drunkening and roughhousing group and made his way away from the bars and pubs, back toward the shops. The decorations and lights in the windows made him feel far better than the promise of liquor and girls.

Rummond found a sweets shop and ducked in for a little box of chocolates. It wasn’t something they got much of at all on the ship, and his sweet tooth had been desperate for weeks. He nibbled at them as he walked, peering into shop windows. Nothing particularly piqued his interest, but he enjoyed looking just the same.

He was looking in at a puff-sleeved red dress - its fabric and gold embroidery shimmering in the shop’s lamp light - and feeling a bit of a wish that he had someone to imagine wanting it for - when a sound across the street drew his attention. A stringed instrument of some sort. It drew him over to the shop, to yet another window.

There was a music shop and a young boy inside, a violin tucked between his shoulder and chin. His tutor walked in circles around him. The boy hit an off note, cringing even before the tutor slapped his bow hand with a slender rod. The music continued after a few seconds, beautiful even if not perfect.

Rummond’s eyes dropped to the window display in front of him. An upright piano with a painted silk panel behind the keys took up most of the space. Around it were propped a few brass instruments, a harp that appeared to be an antique, and more string instruments lined up by size. Near the center there sat propped a fiddle - not as fine as the one the boy played inside, but he couldn’t have afforded one as nice as that, anyway. The one in the window, however...

He left the shop with a violin in its case and two books of music, wondering whether he could successfully teach himself to play the thing or if he’d simply wasted the money on a lark with something else he would fail at.

It took him two weeks and a growing number of dirty looks from the other sailors before he could reliably play pleasant notes rather than screeching his way along. Try as he might, though, he could make neither head nor tails of the written music. 

He understood that the notes were meant to correspond with the sounds, and he went over and over the beginner’s music, but he just couldn’t grasp it. Rummond was nearly ready to put the fiddle away and take it to a pawn shop the next time they were in port when he decided to forget what was on the page. He chose a simple song that he recognized and closed his eyes, concentrating on the sounds from the violin itself.

What came out was by no means perfect, but it was far better and flowed more easily than his attempts at playing by the book. It took practice and time, months of it, but what started out as an exercise in frustration began to soothe his soul. The evenings and leaves that he spent alone in his berth grew a bit less isolated with his improving music as company.

When he at last made it beyond the children’s music that he knew by heart, he dallied for days around the song that he wanted to hear himself play. It had been years since he’d heard it sung, and he could remember not only the words and the tune, but he could hear the voice that had last given it to him. It was feeling the loss of his Aunties again that made him hesitate.

He’d had an… _unpleasant_ day. One of his superior officers had been on a tear and called him by a sharp ‘laddie’ in the middle of a dressing down. His day from that point forward had been nothing save one long string of memories of his father.

Rummond sat down on his bunk, retreating to be alone rather than going to the mess for dinner. He looked at the violin case next to him and wrung his hands in his lap while he tried to convince himself to pop open the latches and take up the instrument. At last he managed to, closing his eyes as he settled it into position and raised the bow.

The notes came so easily he could have cried. He could feel them vibrating through him, washing the pain and memories of fear right from his being, calming his nerves. He was halfway through the first verse before he could make his voice join the music. 

_“Soft the drowsy hours are creeping,”_ Rummond began quietly, and his heart ached with the memory of his Auntie Glenna leaning over him to sing him to sleep. _“Hill and vale in slumber steeping, I my loving vigil keeping… All through the night…”_

**Author's Note:**

> _(Takes place in late December 1892. Rummond is just barely seventeen.)_


End file.
